Delayed Understanding Quotes

Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on.

Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later.

Like a lot of us, sometimes I'm preaching to the choir, and sometimes my voice doesn't even get heard at all. Sometimes I think that what I'm writing now might not even have an impact for the next three or four generations. Sometimes I sit there and write, and I think, "It'll be two hundred years before they get what I'm writing about."

Hell is Truth Seen Too Late.

It is very rare, indeed, for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculations upon the cause of it. I have constantly observed that the generality of people are fifty years, at least, behind in their politics.

My intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

To know that all is well, even if late will come to know it, is at least some gain.

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light on the stars requires time; deeds though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.

With all of my work, it always takes a while for people to get it.